Photo courtesy of "Silver" Nosewicz In 1945, to offer a full scale of the devastation, "Silver" Nosewicz of Syracuse asked an officer to stand in front of the ruins of Nagasaki.

My father served in the Pacific during World War II. He worked on landing craft. In the summer of 1945 he was in the Philippines, training for the invasion of Japan. Like countless other Americans who understood the role they were about to play, he did not expect to survive.

Sixty-three years ago today, the United States dropped the first of two atomic weapons on Japanese cities. The war ended. As a child, like millions of others, I grew up hearing how the atomic bomb saved my father's life.

It was only as I grew older that I began to realize exactly what that meant (take an hour to read the first few chapters of John Hersey's "Hiroshima.") Regardless of what you feel about the military and moral underpinnings of the decision, the vast percentage of the dead and deformed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not Japanese war criminals, or even soldiers. They were infants, schoolchildren, the elderly, young mothers. They had no complicity in the choices made by the rulers of Japan.

If my father was right, then I am alive - and millions upon millions of other Americans are alive - because those innocents died.

I am bound to them, and I pray for them. And whenever I waste a second of my life, I dishonor them.

Silver Nosewicz had a conversation a few days ago, just Silver and a stranger at a counter in a store. Somehow the subject of the atomic bomb came up, maybe because of some comment on the television or radio, and Silver spoke out loud about the horror of the thing.

The other guy shrugged and raised his hands, clearly bored, the bomb about as real to him as the Civil War.

That is why Silver, Sylvester Nosewicz's nickname since childhood, decided it was time. For almost 50 years, since he walked the streets of Nagasaki after one bomb brought it down, Silver has kept photographs he took amid the ruins. He was 20 years old, two years beyond stocking shelves in a grocery, when he carried his camera to ground zero.

It changed him. The photographs are his only way to explain why.

Silver was a sailor on the USS Graffias, a Naval supply ship sent to Nagasaki in September 1945. The bomb was dropped Aug. 9. Forty thousand people were killed. One hundred thousand more died within five years. The Japanese surrendered Aug. 14. All Silver knew was how the war had been ended by a new super bomb, which saved him from joining the planned invasion of Japan.

It was a comic-book image, and it did not prepare him for what he found in Nagasaki.

The Graffias docked in Nagasaki's harbor, where the ship's officers made an offer to the crew. Anyone could go for a tour of the city. It seemed a chance to witness history. They would put them on trucks and take them on a ride through the ruined town, where the roads for some mysterious reason remained clear.

From on board, the city looked like a char pit. The sailors were warned against snapping photographs. Security reasons, the Navy said. Silver had a small Kodak "Brownie" he carried through the war. He had never used it to take pictures of battle scenes. Despite the order, something compelled him to hide the camera and bring it onto shore.

"I figured someday the pictures might be worth something," says Silver, who now lives in Baldwinsville. But he never tried to sell them. When he came home to Syracuse, he put them in a metal box inside his bedroom. Every now and then, he would take them out. They sometimes triggered memories he didn't want to see. He destroyed a few photographs too painful to describe, and the rest he simply placed inside the box.

Silver now has eight grandchildren. It is children, more than anything, who make him remember Nagasaki. He chooses not to get into the specific reason for that, just as he chooses not to discuss any human remains inside the city. Some things, he said, are best left in the past.

But he worries young American adults have no notion of what suffering is about. Compared to what he saw, he said, we live in paradise. "I see kids, little kids, running around happy," he said. "And I don't think we know how lucky we are."

There are things Silver will tell you about his one-day tour. The city had melted from the top, like a candle. A few Japanese survivors begged for food or candy bars. Others stooped and picked among mounds of debris. "I guess some of them were looking for relatives," he said.

He went to a high place to look down on the city, and he struggles to describe the scope of what he saw. "Imagine you're standing in the State Tower Building," he said, "and you turn in every direction ... Nedrow. Fairmount. Solvay. Liverpool. Eastwood ... and it's gone. Dead. Burned."

The photos, he said, may get across that point. "The reason I want these in is so people can see it, can see the destruction, and then they can make their minds up for themselves," he said.

The Navy took the sailors around the city in a convoy. He remembers the scent of soot and ash, a smell akin to walking into a burned-out basement. Everything was silent, the trees brought down, the birds and insects gone. Buildings were leveled, but telephone poles remained.

The sailors spent a day in the city, and then the Navy took them back to the ship, where each man was given a quick pass with a Geiger counter. The machines squealed at the high level of radiation. The sailors were told to take a shower, and no one ever brought up the matter again.

Silver likes to think none of his officers truly understood the threat, but he worries the whole crew was used as guinea pigs. Fifty years later, his health is fine. But he has not stayed in contact with others from the ship, and he has no idea what happened to them.

His feelings on the bomb are deep and complicated. He witnessed much pain inflicted by the Japanese. He does not believe they would have surrendered, and he maintains Harry Truman made the right decision at the time. Silver puts his hand on his chest when he speaks of the Allied invasion that almost happened. "Maybe I wouldn't be here," he said. "Maybe my children, and their children, wouldn't be here."

But he cannot shake the vision of Nagasaki. What troubles him most is the idea of grandparents and parents and children, entire families and their histories, lost and incinerated.

"This is the way it went," he said. "You're sitting at a table, having dinner. You hear the drone of a plane, there's a flash, and that's it. Generations and generations, gone just like that."

He is almost 70 years old, a man who once kicked up the ashes of the atomic bomb. Some parts of the story he will always keep inside. But sometimes he tries to explain the devastation to young adults, young Americans whose biggest concern is the mortgage, and he tries to convince them it still could happen here.

They smile, distracted, and go back to their lives. Silver can remember when he was equally content.